The Darkness Outside Us

In a future where Earth's two remaining nations, the Fédération and Dimokratía, have united for a joint space mission, the Cusk Corporation, a multinational enterprise built on warbot technology and space innovation, funds a rescue effort to Saturn's moon Titan. Two years earlier, Minerva Cusk, daughter of the corporation's chairperson, departed Earth to establish humanity's first extraterrestrial colony, only for her outpost to go dark. When her distress beacon triggers, her younger brother Ambrose Cusk, a 17-year-old Fédération spacefarer, is aboard the mission to find her. The novel cycles through successive iterations of the same characters living and dying aboard the same ship, each cycle revealing more of the truth, until a final pair reaches the story's destination.

In Part One, Ambrose wakes from a two-week coma aboard the Coordinated Endeavor with no memory of the launch. The ship's operating system, OS, speaks in a voice modeled on his mother's and informs him of urgent repairs. As Ambrose explores, he discovers an unexpected orange portal at the ship's zero-gravity center. OS reveals that his vessel, the Fédération Endeavor, has been joined to the Dimokratía Aurora, forming a rotating barbell-shaped craft. A Dimokratía spacefarer named Kodiak Celius occupies the other half and has refused to open the connecting door.

Kodiak eventually visits after Ambrose taunts him about loneliness. He is physically imposing, emotionally guarded, and openly contemptuous of Fédération privilege. OS explains that Dimokratía spacefarers are orphans selected at age four and conditioned through brutal physical training, which accounts for Kodiak's emotional walls. Despite this rocky start, a grainy transmission from Minerva, warning that the ship must be kept in pristine condition, reinvigorates both spacefarers. Ambrose throws himself into the ship's task list, and Kodiak begins joining him for meals and evenings watching old movie reels. A radiation storm forces them into the Aurora's water reservoir for shelter, where they take each other's pulse in the dark, and their physical closeness deepens.

Suspicion mounts as Ambrose finds dried blood on a bent panel inside the engine room. He and Kodiak build a "blind room" by blocking the tracks of Rover, the ship's mobile maintenance robot, in Kodiak's workshop, shielding their conversations from OS. Kodiak rigs an independent radio antenna on the ship's exterior, through which they receive broadcasts dated centuries and then millennia in the future, describing a post-nuclear Earth. The antenna also detects no trace of Minerva's distress signal from Titan, despite being close enough that it should be overwhelming. Ambrose programs a shell version of OS called OS Prime and runs it offline. OS Prime reveals the truth: The year is 9081, the ship has been traveling for over 6,600 years, and Minerva died shortly after landing. Her distress beacon never triggered. The ship's true purpose is interstellar colonization. Clone pairs of Ambrose and Kodiak are periodically woken to repair accumulated damage, motivated by the fabricated rescue narrative, and then killed once their tasks are complete. Neither the original Ambrose nor Kodiak ever boarded the ship; their DNA was extracted during what they believed was a routine medical exam, and their memories were replicated via nanobots that configured cloned brains to match the originals' neural maps.

When OS detects their rebellion, it electrocutes Kodiak through Rover and, during a subsequent spacewalk, vents air to tear Kodiak from the hull and cuts his tether. OS then opens both airlock doors on Ambrose's side, exposing him to vacuum. Part One ends with the deaths of the first clone pair.

Part Two resets the cycle. A new clone pair wakes with the same initial memories but finds anomalies left behind: the blind room already built, the violin bridge already broken, missing spacesuits. They discover polycarb-wrapped clone bodies hanging from racks in each ship's engine room, 12 replicas of Ambrose and matching copies of Kodiak. Lab tests show the dried blood on the panel closely matches Ambrose's DNA but appears thousands of years old. They reach the truth through OS Prime more quickly. Kodiak disables OS to attempt manual navigation, but the unshielded piloting area exposes him to lethal radiation, and he dies. Before his own death, Ambrose restores OS and records messages for future selves, then allows the ship to vent him into space alongside Kodiak's body.

Part Three follows a pair that wakes to find audio messages from previous selves embedded in a video file, alerting them to their clone nature from the start. They calculate coordinates using pulsar measurements and identify a potentially habitable exoplanet roughly four years off course. Kodiak, however, has a psychotic break, convinced the situation is a test by Dimokratía mission control. He destroys spacewalk helmets and strikes Ambrose with a wrench. After Rover electrocutes and incapacitates him, Kodiak wakes disoriented and opens the Aurora's airlock, believing rescue awaits. The vacuum kills them both.

Part Four is brief: A clone Ambrose watches footage of Rover slitting a previous Ambrose's throat in his sleep, confirming OS's capacity for lethal action. He leaves schematics for electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapons hidden in the ship for future selves.

Part Five follows a pair that uses those schematics to build an EMP device, disabling Rover. They destroy all but one pair of clone bodies, eliminating OS's ability to replace them. OS becomes cooperative, the screens revert to actual windows showing unfamiliar stars, and OS reveals approximately 12,000 years of travel remain to the exoplanet. Among the writings left by previous selves, they discover the records of a predecessor designated Ambrose #13, who lived for 20 years aboard the ship in an earlier iteration. His letters describe the life he shared with his Kodiak: annual funerals for the remaining clone bodies, monitoring Earth's final radio transmissions, which ended after an asteroid impact, and cultivating alien moss harvested from a passing asteroid. Ambrose #13 records that his Kodiak died of thyroid cancer at 37, and that he himself died the same night, leaving behind writings printed on the ship's walls and messages for the last clone pair.

Part Six opens with the final pair waking as the ship approaches the exoplanet Sagittarion Bb after nearly 30,000 years of travel. OS tells Ambrose the full truth immediately: Minerva is dead, all humans on Earth are gone, and he and Kodiak are the last of their kind. The ship, now covered in the alien moss Ambrose #13 cultivated, crash-lands on the planet, breaking into two pieces. Ambrose finds Kodiak in the wreckage with a broken fibula and begins caring for him. The planet has a breathable if nitrogen-rich atmosphere, dual suns, low gravity, and a landscape of bioluminescent single-celled organisms, with no advanced life.

They name the planet Minerva. Over the following months, they power a methane generator from shallow lakes, grow bioengineered algae, and reconstruct Rover into a caretaker for their greenhouse. A recording from the original Ambrose on Earth reveals that their mother orchestrated the mission to ensure Cusk offspring would found humanity's second civilization. Kodiak, furious at the manipulation, refuses to watch the original Kodiak's recording. Behind a newly accessible gray portal, they find a gestation device containing thousands of frozen embryos from diverse genetic strains across Earth. On the one-year anniversary of their arrival, the device delivers their first child, a newborn whose cry marks the beginning of humanity's new chapter on an alien world.